Oslo seminar on Dalit women, neoliberalism and India’s disjunctures

September 5, 2012 - 14:15-16:00

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Dr. Karin Kapadia, Contemporary South Asian Studies, Oxford university, UK, holds an open seminar on ”The necessity of faith: Dalit women, neoliberalism and India’s disjunctures” on Wednesday 5 September 2012. The seminar is organised by the Department of Social Anthropology (SAI), University of Oslo.

Karin Kapadia has been researching in Tamilnadu, South India since 1986. Her several publications include the monograph, ”Siva and Her Sisters: Gender, Caste and Class in Rural South India” (1995) and the edited volume, ”The Violence of Development: The Politics of Identity, Gender and Social Inequalities in India” (2002). In her lecture, she focuses on the effects of neoliberalism in India, increasing the gap between rich and poor. The ‘new economy’ allows some mobility to better-off Dalits, but does not prevent discrimination against Dalits. Neoliberal capitalism is assisted by patriarchal ideologies that subordinate most women. With worsening options, how do lower-income Hindu Dalit women in Chennai slums find meaning in their lives? One possibility, for some women, has been conversion to Pentecostal Christianity. The meanings of Tamil Pentecostalism for Dalit women, and what ‘females-only’ conversion can tell us about the state of the nation, will be explored.

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